Page 5 of Second Chance Fate

He'd tried to ask people about her, and no one knew who he was talking about. In Hope Falls, that was unheard of. How could someone so remarkable go unnoticed? He’d promised himself the next time he saw her, he didn’t care what he had to do; he was going to talk to her.

When she started to turn, he saw that she was on the phone. Her hand was covering part of her face, holding the device. By the time she fully turned around, he realized that the woman on the bridge was not his mystery woman.

Disappointment swelled in him as he slowed his pace. What was he thinking? How could he think that he knew a woman he’d never spoken to by seeing her hair from behind a hundred yards away on a bridge?

He’d completely given up dating since his private life had gotten a lot of public interest, but maybe he needed to rethink that.

“Hi!” Prudence Carson pulled on Ballerina, her standard poodle’s, leash as the dog dragged her down the path, and the duo barreled toward him.

“Hey.” He acknowledged her with a chin nod.

“We should get the girls together for a doggie date.” She waved her hand between them as she passed him.

The last time the girls got together, Ballerina went after Minnie, Caleb’s nine-month-old St. Bernard. Prudence enrolled her in behavioral classes, but if the walk was any indication, they didn’t seem to be working.

“Check my schedule with Judy.” That was his blanket response to any request he didn’t want to deal with. Judy’s official role was church administrator, but she was so much more than that. She started as his father’s secretary forty years earlier. She was around before he was born. She babysat Caleb from the time he was three weeks old and helped raise him, just like half the town had.

In her current role, she was his buffer from…well, everyone, and thankfully, she relished that role. It was a win-win arrangement.

“Sounds good!” Prudence shouted.

Caleb continued down the path and was running through the notes on the sermon when he heard a high-pitched whistle. He glanced up and saw Kelly King, who was his first kiss during a game of seven minutes in heaven when he was twelve, riding a bike toward him.

“Lookin’ good,Hot Pastor!” She emphasized two words he truly felt shouldneverhave been strung together as she cycled past.

Caleb smiled, hoping to hide the way he felt at hearing the nickname that he’d been given against his will. He just wanted it to go away. People expected him to be flattered by the moniker, but the opposite was the case. He hated it.

Dating was difficult enough being a young pastor; he didn’t need anything else, another outside force, making people act and behave even stranger around him, which is exactly what happened. It was the reason he’d taken a step back from dating at all.

Being the pastor’s son meant Caleb was born with a spotlight over his crib. It wasn’t the harsh, hot kind that made people sweat or reveal flaws in high definition. His was a gentler, diffused light: the sort that made him visible at all times, even when he wished for shadows to hide in.

From his earliest memory, Caleb couldn’t remember a day without being watched. He was the kid who learned all his lines for the Christmas play before Thanksgiving, the one who never so much as whispered during service, who sat upright in the pew and sang hymns with his eyes shut in earnest. It didn’t matter that the rest of his classmates passed notes or played paper football in the back row—he was expected to be both a model and a target.

Every adult in Hope Falls had a story about “that time when little Caleb…” and every story ended with him either demonstrating impossible compassion or, more often, accidentally embarrassing his parents by asking the kinds of questions only a child would think to ask, and only a pastor’s kid would be bold enough to ask in public.

With the spotlight came scrutiny, but Caleb handled it with the practiced ease of someone who’d never known life without it. He was always “on,” but he didn’t mind. His work was his calling, and he loved every part of it, from the quiet hospitalvisits at dawn to the nerve-wracking, extemporaneous eulogies for people who’d lived and died before he was even born.

He even liked the potlucks, though he could do without the Jell-O salads.

It was all good until one Friday in late May, when his phone pinged at 7pm with a text from his childhood friend, Karina Black.

Karina:You’re trending, Hot Pastor. Don’t blow it. K.

One post. That was all it took for people to lose their ever-loving minds. Granted, it was a post from Karina Black, a pop star who had over thirty million followers and had gone from being a middle school talent show standout to headlining global stadium tours, but still, he was just a guy. Karina and Caleb grew up together; she was his cousin Lauren’s best friend. He forgot sometimes, most of the time, actually, that she was a worldwide celebrity. She’d teased him about the “Hot Pastor” thing when Andrew Scott’s character “Hot Priest” on the showFleabagwas popular, then she forgot about it. Until, like Lazarus, it was resurrected when Adam Brody was coined “Hot Rabbi” in the Netflix hitNobody Wants This. Karina decided to make a TikTok compilation of Adam Brody as “Hot Rabbi,” Andrew Scott as “Hot Priest,” and Caleb as “Hot Pastor.” The caption read:First there was Hot Priest, then Hot Rabbi. Now, meet Hot Pastor—@calebharrison in Hope Falls, CA.#HolySmokeShow

When he saw it initially, he thought it was funny, clever even. Karina had a very dry, sarcastic, witty sense of humor he’d always appreciated. He went to bed, and the post had about fifty thousand views. When he woke up in the morning, it had over ten million. By the end of the week, it had over one hundred million.

People, women mostly, started showing up at his house unannounced. The church got vandalized. His parents’ home gotbroken into while they were away on a cruise, which they took often now that they were retired. Whoever broke in stole his baby book that had his first tooth, a lock of his hair, and his ultrasound pictures in it, which devastated his mom.

It got a tidal wave of likes, retweets, and heart-eyed emojis. He was tagged in BuzzFeed roundups and Instagram fan accounts. The phone didn’t stop vibrating for weeks. He was a meme and apparently, a minor celebrity—at least to the masses who spent their days mining the internet for something to believe in or, at minimum, something to laugh at.

Caleb had always been a public figure, but this new brand of fame was different. The attention was electric, global, and hungry. He found himself fielding interview requests from Christian radio stations and talk show producers alike. Local news vans camped outside the church, hoping to catch a glimpse of him in action, maybe even hear a juicy off-the-record confession. The congregation grew even further, the pews suddenly crowded with out-of-towners and college girls clutching their phones, waiting for the perfect TikTok moment.

His inbox filled with messages—some earnest, some unhinged, most from women with strong opinions about what a “hot pastor” should or should not do with his time and body. It was funny at first. Then it was overwhelming. Then frustrating. Then a little scary. Then frustrating, again. Then, gradually, it just became part of the job.

Hope Falls had always been a tourist town, but Caleb had never, in his wildest imagination, thoughthewould be one of the attractions. He was turned into an overnight pseudo-celebrity, but he was hoping that the attention had died down somewhat. He was ready for things to be normal again. Maybe then he could concentrate on his personal life. He wanted a family more than anything. To do that, he’d need to date. To date, he’d need privacy.

Caleb was lost in the tempo of his feet hitting the pavement in a steady rhythm when he heard psychedelic trance music. He lifted his head and saw Art Gardine barefoot in distressed baggy jeans with his patterned shirt unbuttoned, sitting on the grassy slope beside the riverfront in a cross-legged yoga position next to a Beats Pill Speaker, which he assumed was where the stoner concert was coming from.

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